Review by Henry Mayer…
‘Suppose that public school administrators began to insist that teachers who despair about the slow progress their students make in class should take daily doses of a drug to lift their spirits. Research sponsored by grants from major pharmaceutical houses, it is argued, shows that teachers grow depressed because their students don’t learn fast enough are suffering from a disease called “pedagogue hyperdesirousness.” Indeed, some investigators maintain that teachers who can’t seem to accept the idea that schools shouldn’t expect children to learn very much are themselves probably minimally brain-damaged. Prospective teachers are to be screened for manifestations of “hyperdesirousness,” and those who become angry at being ordered to take drugs are informed that their jobs will be terminated if they refuse to comply with the administrative prescription. Surely major protests would be organized by teachers associations, civil libertarians, medical groups and concerned parents; the research would be carefully scrutinized, and even if the drug requirement were not dropped entirely, its application would be halted pending additional study and review.
The concept of coercive action against “hyperdesirous” teachers may be considered an absurd bit of totalitarian doublethink. It is not so far-fetched as one might hope, for as Peter Schrag and Diane Divoky persuasively demonstrate in their study, “The Myth of the Hyperactive Child,” the formidable coercive power of the public school is now regularly used to force a dubious diagnosis and dangerous drugs upon perhaps as many as one million children who lack effective means of protest.
Schrag and Divoky present us with fine polemical writing in a well-researched and thoughtfully argued brief intended to stimulate informed action against the widespread use of drugs, psychological testing, data banks, “predelinquency” screening, behaviour modification and other purportedly scientific means of “early intervention” used by agents of the state to control children’s lives and undermine their rights. Through these programs, the authors charge, an entire generation is being conditioned “to distrust its own instincts, to regard its deviation from the narrowing standards of approval norms as sickness and to rely on the institutions of the state and on technology to define and engineer its health.”
Their claim may seem an exaggerated response to the seemingly benevolent practice of giving kids Ritalin to help then sit still in class or screening school populations for signs of neurological damage. The authors ably show, however, that “minimal brain dysfunction (MBD),” the syndrome of which embraces hyperactivity along with difficulties in reading and other problems, is not a medical entity at all, but rather a “disease by default,” an ailment which puts the weight of a spurious science against “those children who have no other problems but who don’t learn to talk or read as their elders think they should.” No current neurological tests can differentiate hyperactive or other MBD children from control subjects; the whopping list of ninety-nine MBD “symptoms” prepared by a national task force includes such vague categories as “spotty or patchy intellectual defects,” “general awkwardness,” “slowness in finishing work,” “easy fatigability” and “possibly antisocial behaviour” — an array of problems which, along with the foot-tapping, wriggling and insistent questioning said to characterize the hyperactive, may send a number of book reviewers as well as schoolchildren to the druggist.
The diagnosis of hyperactivity or other minimal brain dysfunction is based almost entirely upon school behaviour and academic performance, yet in arriving at it, practitioners—including school administrators, guidance counselors and psychologists—examine only the child, not teachers or the institutional setting itself. Schrag and Divoky charge, moreover, that schools often refer parents to doctors who routinely and quickly prescribe Ritalin or other drugs, and authorities treat the reports of physicians who find the already labelled child within the range of normality skeptically. The authors also report a number of cases in which parents who refused to accept the school’s diagnosis have been threatened that their child will be held back in grade or expelled.
Schrag and Divoky blast most of the research on MBD as sloppy, distorted and easily open to misinterpretation. Their footnotes recount confrontations with researchers who privately acknowledge elementary errors in definition and computation, although their published accounts remain uncorrected. Very little has been done on how Ritalin, an amphetamine banned in Sweden as too dangerous, actually works to calm children, and it is difficult to fully ascertain its side-effects—although they apparently include serious weight-loss, dizziness, depression and even psychosis. The authors soundly conclude, however that safety is not the fundamental issue. “The most dangerous psychoactive drug is precisely the one that is medically the safest. . .” they write, for it is the “ideology
of drugging” and early intervention that poses the greatest threat to personal liberty.
All the major social institutions dealing with children now employ screening and testing programs that stigmatize and restrict children in undeserved, invidious ways. This book warns that our “first dosslerized generation” is growing up accustomed to being watched, tested, labeled, treated and conditioned to accept the legitimacy of the ever-growing enlargement of the power of institutions over individuals.
The issue of legitimacy lies at the heart of this book, and it is no accident that the schools—the institution most responsible for creating faith in the state—should be in the vanguard of institutions using these new interventionist techniques based on highly moralistic scientism. School officials, the authors argue, see themselves as representatives of authority, not as advocates of children. The schools all too often teach submission rather than independence and extol the need for control rather than the possibility of freedom. The lesson of behaviour technology—that any individual’s ability to cope with the world is limited and requires external management by drugs and experts—is consistent with a great number of other institutional arrangements that reinforce uncritical acceptance of the existing social order. The development of a professional caste of school administrators in the late 19th century drew heavily upon the faith in expertise proclaimed by the developing social sciences, and the subtle compound of efficiency, benevolence and authority has, if anything, intensified over the years.’
